| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Errol Black and Tom Mitchell, A Square Deal For All And No Railroading: Historical Essays on Labour in Brandon (St. John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2000)

THIS BOOK TAKES its title from an essay by Tom Mitchell that first appeared in Prairie Forum in 1990, and which in turn took the phrase from a declaration made by the Brandon Trades and Labour Council in 1917. Such layering of reference is apt, perhaps, for while the essays here are frequently challenging and critical of orthodoxy, there is also a sense that much of what this volume contains is comfortably — and comfortingly — familiar to anyone who has studied western Canadian labour over the past two or three decades.	1
"The essays in this collection," write historian Tom Mitchell and economist Errol Black in their introduction, "are unabashedly about reconstructing and disclosing aspects of the history of class and class relations in Brandon." (12) Brandon might, at first glance, appear an odd choice for such a study, numbering just 14,000 or so in the tumultuous year of 1919 — less than half of all those who were on strike in Winnipeg — and possessing a modest industrial base. But as the nine essays here make clear, class and class conflict are not the exclusive preserve of larger urban centres, either in the West or elsewhere. "The experience of small cities has been neglected," Errol and Tom Black note in their essay on civic politics in Brandon, and it would it be wrong to assume it simply mirrors developments in larger cities such as Winnipeg or Calgary. Instead, as their piece makes clear, "there are unique aspects in the Brandon experience ... which originated in the peculiarities of local class relations and local politics." (27)	2
Quoting liberally from Marx, Gramsci, Thompson, and Williams, the book's co-authors set out their position on class. They reject a "simple minded [sic] understanding of the relationship between the material world and the consciousness and actions of workers" in favour of the belief that "individuals make sense of, and respond to, the world they inhabit through a process mediated by material circumstances, culture (including competing social, political, and economic discourses) and human agency." (16) This is setting the bar high, of course, in that the essays that follow have to measure up to this ideal.	3
All but one of the book's nine essays have appeared previously in various journals. (The single exception is "The Making of the East End Community Club" by Errol and Tom Black, which closes proceedings) Mitchell is author or co-author of five of the pieces here; Black is solely or jointly responsible for the remaining four. The opening four essays appear under the collective heading, "Labour and Politics," the second three under "Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations," and the final pair under "Shaping a Working-Class Culture." In short, then, they cover well-trodden territory and at first glance might appear less innovative or bold than the book's introduction promises. On closer inspection, however, Mitchell and Black do indeed throw some new light on the nature of class in the West.	4
The first two essays provide overviews of labour politics in Brandon. "Labour in Brandon Civic Politics: A Long View" is particularly useful, for it covers not only the familiar decades 1900–40, but also the far less explored war years and post-war decades up to the 1970s. As such we get a sense of continuity as well as change in the course of labour's electoral evolution. Mitchell's more focused essay on Brandon labour politics between 1900 and 1920, and his conclusion that "a class conscious labourite ideology had spread to a large proportion of Brandon's working class" (84) should be read and considered against this broader background.	5
Switching from politics to industrial relations, Mitchell's two essays on the 1919 sympathy strike and the 1922 teachers' conflict underline the depth, breadth, and resonance of class conflict in the small Prairie city. One might quibble with his assertion that Brandon workers staged the "longest and most cohesive sympathetic strike" (145) in 1919 (the essay by Greg Kealey that he cites to support this shows that Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Vancouver all have far greater claim to this title), but his essay remains a valuable addition to the literature on 1919. Even better, perhaps, is Errol Black's account of industrial relations at the A.E. McKenzie Company between 1944 and 1952, both in emphasizing that class tensions did not just "go away" after the defeat of 1919 and in underlining the active role of female workers in Brandon's post-war labour force.	6
The book's final two essays — one on the Brandon labour movement's educational policies and practices, the other on the East End Community Club — explore the world of working-class culture in the "Wheat City" in the years surrounding World War I. The former is especially thoughtful in bringing together such disparate elements as the local Trades and Labour Council, various labour and socialist parties, the People's Church and the People's Forum into a single analysis. Whether the uneasy amalgam of accommodative labourism and more revolutionary socialism divided Brandon workers more than it brought them together, however, remains open to question.	7
Indeed, there is a sense sometimes that the empirical evidence in this collection of essays is unable to live up to the promises of the introduction. While useful and informative in themselves, the pieces on labour politics and industrial relations do not really support the authors' claim that "experience of class emerged as the dominant theme over gender, ethnicity, race, or other social identities in the history of Brandon's workers." (17) There is also a sense at times that Brandon workers's experience of and response to industrial capitalism did indeed mirror those of workers in other western cities, and that while this book adds to our knowledge of western labour it does not necessarily adjust it. The fact that six of the nine essays deal with that well-mined period — 1900–30 — rather compounds this perception.	8
That said, A Square Deal For All And No Railroading is a welcome addition to western Canadian labour historiography. Taken together, its essays provide a detailed and often nicely nuanced account of class relations in Brandon, a city often overlooked in broader accounts of the West. And two essays in particular — Mitchell's revisionist account of Methodist minister A.E. Smith and Black's study of the revolutionary communist Forkin family — should become essential reading for anyone who thinks they know the history of Western labour.	9
David Bright University of Guelph

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